Irvine Welsh

Irvine Welsh

Irvine Welsh 2004 at the Edinburgh International Book Festival
Born (1957-09-27) 27 September 1957
Leith, Edinburgh, Scotland
Occupation Writer
Nationality Scottish
Alma mater Heriot-Watt University
Genre Novel, play, short story
Literary movement Modernism, post-modernism
Notable works Trainspotting,
The Acid House
Filth
Porno
Website
www.irvinewelsh.net

Irvine Welsh (born 27 September 1957) is a Scottish novelist, playwright and short story writer. He is recognised for his novel Trainspotting, which was later made into a film of the same name. His work is characterised by a raw Scots dialect and brutal depiction of Edinburgh life. He has also written plays and screenplays, and directed several short films.

Biography

Irvine Welsh was born in Leith, the port area of the Scottish capital Edinburgh. His birth record states that he was born in 1957, though it has been widely reported that it is actually 1951.[1] When he was four, his family moved to Muirhouse, in Edinburgh, where they stayed in local housing schemes.[2] His mother worked as a waitress. His father was a dock worker in Leith until bad health forced him to quit, after which he became a carpet salesman; he died when Welsh was 25. Welsh left Ainslie Park High School when he was 16 and then completed a City and Guilds course in electrical engineering. He became an apprentice TV repairman until an electric shock persuaded him to move on to a series of other jobs.[2] He left Edinburgh for the London punk scene in 1978, where he played guitar and sang in The Pubic Lice and Stairway 13,[2] the latter a reference to the Ibrox disaster. A series of arrests for petty crimes and finally a suspended sentence for trashing a North London community centre inspired Welsh to correct his ways. He worked for Hackney London Borough Council in London and studied computing with the support of the Manpower Services Commission.[2]

Welsh returned to Edinburgh in the late 1980s, where he worked for the city council in the housing department. He then studied for an MBA at Heriot Watt University.[3]

Welsh has made several reading tours around the world and has been involved with house music as a DJ, promoter and producer. Welsh has been an official ambassador of the Homeless World Cup movement since 2014.[4]

On 20 April 2012, on BBC Breakfast, he stated that he lives in Chicago with his wife, Elizabeth. Previously he lived in Dublin, Ireland, and regularly attended Bohemian Football Club games.[5][6] In an interview with The Daily Mail on 7 August 2006, he described himself as "not so much middle-class as upper-class. I'm very much a gentleman of leisure. I write. I sit and look out of my window into the garden. I enjoy books. I love the density and complexity of Jane Austen and George Eliot. I listen to music; I travel. I can go off to a film festival whenever I like." He also describes himself as monogamous: "it sounds boring but it's the way I am".

Fiction

Irvine Welsh in Warsaw, Poland, 13 March 2006

To date, Welsh has published eleven novels and four collections of short stories. His first novel, Trainspotting, was published in 1993. Set in the mid-1980s, it uses a series of loosely connected short stories to tell the story of a group of characters tied together by decaying friendships, heroin addiction and stabs at escape from the oppressive boredom and brutality of their lives in the housing schemes. It was released to shock and outrage in some circles and great acclaim in others; Time Out called it "funny, unflinchingly abrasive, authentic and inventive", and The Sunday Times called Welsh "the best thing that has happened to British writing for decades". It was adapted as a play, and a film adaptation, directed by Danny Boyle and written by John Hodge, was released in 1996. Welsh appeared in the film as Mikey Forrester, a minor character. The film was a worldwide success. U.S. Senator Bob Dole decried its supposed moral depravity and glorification of drug use during the 1996 presidential campaign, although he admitted that he had not seen the film.[7]

The novel has since achieved a cult status, aided by the global success of the film.[8]

Next, Welsh released The Acid House, a collection of short stories from Rebel Inc., New Writing Scotland and other sources. Many of the stories take place in and around the housing schemes from Trainspotting, and employ many of the same themes; a touch of fantasy is apparent in stories such as The Acid House, where the minds of a baby and a drug user swap bodies, or The Granton Star Cause, where God transforms a man into a fly[3] as punishment for wasting his life. Welsh adapted three of the stories for a later film of the same name, in which he also appeared.

Welsh's third book (and second novel), Marabou Stork Nightmares, alternates between a typically grim tale of thugs and schemes in sub-working class Scotland and a hallucinatory adventure tale set in South Africa. Gradually, common themes begin to emerge between the two stories, culminating in a shocking ending.

His next book, Ecstasy: Three Tales of Chemical Romance (1996), became his most high-profile work since Trainspotting, released in the wave of publicity surrounding the film. It consists of three unconnected novellas: the first, Lorraine Goes To Livingston, is a bawdy satire of classic British romance novels, the second, Fortune's Always Hiding, is a revenge story involving thalidomide and the third, The Undefeated, is a sly, subtle romance between a young woman dissatisfied with the confines of her suburban life and an aging clubgoer.

A corrupt police officer and his tapeworm served as the narrators for his third novel, Filth (1998). The main character of Filth was a vicious sociopathic policeman. The novel was adapted to a film with the same name in 2013.

Glue (2001) was a return to the locations, themes and episodic form of Trainspotting, telling the stories of four characters spanning several decades in their lives and the bonds that held them together.

Having revisited some of them in passing in Glue, Welsh brought most of the Trainspotting characters back for a sequel, Porno, in 2002. In this book Welsh explores the impact of pornography on the individuals involved in producing it, as well as society as a whole, and the impact of ageing and maturity in individuals against their will. The book is set just after the opening of the new Scottish Parliament.[3]

The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs (2006), deals with a young, alcoholic civil servant who finds himself inadvertently putting a curse on his nemesis, a nerdy co-worker. In 2007, Welsh published If You Liked School You'll Love Work, his first collection of short stories in over a decade.

Welsh contributed a novella called Contamination to The Weekenders: Travels in the Heart of Africa. Welsh, Ian Rankin, and Alexander McCall Smith each contributed a short story for the One City compilation published in 2005 in benefit of the One City Trust for social inclusion in Edinburgh.

In Crime, Ray Lennox (from Welsh's previous work, Filth) is recovering from a mental breakdown induced by occupational stress and cocaine abuse, and a particularly horrifying child sex murder case back in Edinburgh. The story takes place in Florida.

In 2012 Welsh published a prequel to Trainspotting, entitled Skagboys.[9][10][11] Set in Leith in the early 1980s, it introduces the Trainspotting characters and follows them as they fall into heroin addiction. Given as a series of linked short stories, the book is also interspersed with brief commentaries on contemporary British politics. In particular, the consequences of the destruction of industry in the northern cities are drawn for the young working class.

His eighth novel, The Sex Lives of Siamese Twins, was published in May 2014.

In April 2015 his ninth novel was published via Vintage Books, entitled A Decent Ride and featuring the returning character ‘Juice’ Terry Lawson (previously from Glue). Despite this, it is a standalone story and not a sequel.

Welsh's tenth novel, released in April 2016, is entitled The Blade Artist, and centers around a seemingly rehabilitated Francis Begbie now living in California with a wife and children.[12] It was shortlisted for the Fiction Book of the Year at Saltire Literary Awards 2016. [13]

Film and stage

As well as fiction, Irvine Welsh has written several stage plays, including Headstate, You'll Have Had Your Hole, and the musical Blackpool, which featured original songs by Vic Godard of the Subway Sect.

More recently he co-authored Babylon Heights with his screen writing partner Dean Cavanagh. The play premiered in San Francisco at the Exit Theatre and made its European première in Dublin, at The Mill Theatre Dundrum, directed by Graham Cantwell. The plot revolves around the behind-the-scenes antics of a group of Munchkins on the set of The Wizard of Oz. The production included the use of oversized sets with actors of regular stature.

Cavanagh and Welsh have also collaborated on screenplays. The Meat Trade is based on the 19th century West Port murders. Despite the historical source material, Welsh has set the story in the familiar confines of present-day Edinburgh, with Burke and Hare depicted as brothers who steal human organs to meet the demands of the global transplant market.

Wedding Belles, a film made for Channel 4 that was written by Welsh and Cavanagh, aired at the end of March 2007. The film centres around the lives of four young women, who are played by Michelle Gomez, Shirley Henderson, Shauna MacDonald, and Kathleen McDermot. Wedding Belles was nominated for a Scottish BAFTA and was subsequently sold to TV channels in Canada and Europe.

Welsh has directed several short films for bands. In 2001 he directed a 15-minute film for Gene's song "Is It Over" which is taken from the album Libertine. In 2006 he directed a short film to accompany the track "Atlantic" from Keane's album Under the Iron Sea.

Welsh directed his first short dramatic film, NUTS, which he co-wrote with Cavanagh. The film features Joe McKinney as a man dealing with testicular cancer in post Celtic tiger Ireland. It was released in 2007.

Welsh co-directed "The Right to liberty", a chapter of the documentary film The New Ten Commandments, in 2008.

In 2009 Welsh directed the film Good Arrows (co-directed by Helen Grace). It was written by Welsh and Cavanagh. The film is about a darts player who suffers from depression which causes him to lose his skill.[14]

Themes

As well as recreational drug use, Welsh's fiction and non-fiction is dominated by the question of working class and Scottish identity in the period spanning the 1960s to the present day. Within this, he explores the rise and fall of the council housing scheme, denial of opportunity, sectarianism, football, hooliganism, sex, suppressed homosexuality, dance clubs, low-paid work, freemasonry, Irish republicanism, sodomy, class divisions, emigration and, perhaps most of all, the humour, prejudices and axioms of the Scots.

Sam Leith, writing in the Financial Times, argues that: "Welsh’s concerns are with sin and salvation, with the exercise of free will and with the individual soul. He's much more interested in teleology than sociology."[15]

Style

Welsh's novels share characters, giving the feel of a "shared universe" within his writing. For example, characters from Trainspotting make cameo appearances in The Acid House, Marabou Stork Nightmares, Ecstasy, Filth, and slightly larger appearances in Glue, whose characters then appear in Porno.

Welsh is known for writing in his native Edinburgh Scots dialect. He generally ignores the traditional conventions of literary Scots, used for example by Allan Ramsay, Robert Fergusson, Robert Burns, Robert Louis Stevenson, and James Orr. Instead, he transcribes dialects phonetically.

Like Alasdair Gray before him, Welsh also experiments with typography. In the book Filth, the tapeworm's internal monologue is imposed over the top of the protagonist's own internal monologue (the worm's host), visibly depicting the tapeworm's voracious appetite, much like the "Climax of Voices" in Gray's novel 1982, Janine.

Bibliography

Novels

Short story collections

Script writing

Theatre

Adaptations

Film

Theatre

[22]

References

  1. ↑ McKay, Ron (11 August 2002). "Ron McKay: the real Irvine Welsh?". The Guardian.
  2. 1 2 3 4 The Novelist Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting: A Reader's Guide, by Robert A. Morace. Published by Continuum International Publishing Group, 2001. ISBN 0-8264-5237-X.Page 7-24
  3. 1 2 3 http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/profiles/27h8d0xjjCVtTSnW5zbNF0V/irvine-welsh
  4. ↑ http://www.homelessworldcup.com/testimonial/irvine-welsh/
  5. ↑ Welsh, Irvine (18 October 2007). "Irvine Welsh: In the past 15 years Dublin has gone from being Calcutta to Paris". The Irish Independent. Retrieved 17 February 2012.
  6. ↑ Murphy, Claire (13 January 2009). "Author can't find buyer for his Dublin home". Evening Herald. Retrieved 17 February 2012.
  7. ↑ Furek, Maxim W. (2008). The Death Proclamation of Generation X: A Self-Fulfilling Prophesy of Goth, Grunge and Heroin. i-Universe. p. 105. ISBN 978-0-595-46319-0.
  8. ↑ Contemporary Scottish Fictions—Film, Television, and the Novel: Film, Television and the Novel, by Duncan J. Petrie. Published by Edinburgh University Press, 2004.ISBN 0748617892. Page 101-102.
  9. ↑ Sweeney, Charlene; Bannerman, Lucy. "Prequel to chart Trainspotting characters' fall from innocence". timesonline.com. London. Retrieved 17 March 2007.
  10. ↑ Flood, Alison (19 January 2009). "Welsh offers chance to score a role in Trainspotting prequel". guardian.co.uk. London. Retrieved 20 January 2009.
  11. ↑ "My week Irvine Welsh A few punches to toughen up then Im Trainspotting again". The Times. London. 25 January 2009. Retrieved 5 May 2010.
  12. ↑ http://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/culture/books/irvine-welsh-to-publish-francis-begbie-novel-1-3925969
  13. ↑ "Welsh and Kelman shortlisted for Saltire literary prize". BBC News. 2016-10-21. Retrieved 2016-10-21.
  14. ↑ "Good Arrows". IMDb.com. IMDb.com, Inc. Retrieved 29 July 2012.
  15. ↑ Sam Leith (14 April 2012). "Life choice". The Financial Times. The Financial Times Limited. Retrieved 29 July 2012.
  16. ↑ "Irvine Welsh gives his friends a Dose". BBC. BBC. 15 July 2003. Retrieved 29 July 2012.
  17. ↑ "Welsh's four women and a wedding". Scotsman.com. Scotsman.com. 1 March 2007. Retrieved 29 July 2012.
  18. ↑ "Theatre". Irvine Welsh. The Random House Group Limited. Retrieved 29 July 2012.
  19. ↑ "Full cast and crew for Dockers". IMDb.com. IMDb.com, Inc. Retrieved 29 July 2012.
  20. 1 2 "Film". Irvine Welsh. The Random House Group Limited. Retrieved 29 July 2012.
  21. ↑ "Bad Blood". Irvine Welsh. The Random House Group Limited. Retrieved 29 July 2012.
  22. ↑ "Irvine's plays and theatre adaptations". Irvine Welsh. The Random House Group Limited. Retrieved 29 July 2012.

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